One Last Letter To The Editor.

And then this came in on Thanksgiving, of all days:

Hello Mr. Archibald,

My name is Jacqueline, I'm 17. Just like your son, I am autistic. I was diagnosed as moderate to severe when I was around three years old. I just wanted to say that I am touched by the National Geographic photograph of your child in the living room, it was truly astonishing. And the curtains was a nice touch.

You have truly crossed a threshold that people have been trying to cross for many years now. This is exactly how we see the world. All of us are caught behind this bubble with white and grey fog. Please, if you can, I would like to speak to you more about it. But I understand if you can't, you are quite a busy man.
Sincerely:
Jacqueline

Read other Letters To The Editor HERE.

End Of The Gauntlet Is Near

Elf On The Shelf, 12/2010

Have I ever mentioned that I hate this time of year? I feel like its something I tell everyone...there I am on the phone talking to my sister who has been in the hospital for months and I'm complaining about the holiday. Don't you have anything real to complain about? On the phone with Kate from Tidepool, telling her the same sentiment. Maybe you should keep these thoughts to yourself? It's just too much work!

Oh...but here we are...near the end. Let's try to enjoy it with photographs in the home stretch..more to come as we end the year.

Fingers 11/2010

Fingers, 11/2010

TA: What happened? It really was so easy for like, a long time, wasn't it?

CS: Yea...it was.

TA: I liked it all better in the photographs...it all looked so romantic and dreamy. I want that...

CS: It was never like that. I told you you were doing this to try to make it better for you...you thought you could control the whole thing in the photographs. Make it like you wanted it to be. You forgot what it was really like.

TA: What about that guy who solved all his kid's problems with photography? Its in the paper now.

CS: Nope, thats just the story. This is what its really like. You just forgot.

Monday Double Rainbow

Double rainbow caused by late summer sunlight reflecting off a compact disc, 9/2010

Things That Look Like Humans

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I have always been interested in pointing my camera at machines that look like humans.

I've also been interested in the people engaged with these machines...so the robotic work of David Hanson seemed like something rich to explore. Discover Magazine commissioned me to go see what Hanson was up to back in the fall and we are psyched that the story is out this month and psyched that the series will be in the PDN Photo Annual this year as well. Yea for us!
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Hanson is influenced by science fiction author Philip K. Dick and in 2005 created the Philip K. Dick Android Project: an android robot of Dick that answered questions about his life, his work, and recognized close relatives of Dick who approached him. With tape recorder in hand, I asked Hanson to give me some backround. It's long and stream of consciousness stuff, but I wanted to share it because it really reflects what it feels like to speak to Hanson. It can be kinda epic:

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When I was 18 yrs old I read the book VALIS by Philip K. Dick. In this book the narrator felt, in a flash of pink laser light, that he received this charge by the universe of information about how this future entities called Vast Active Living Intelligence Systems ( VALIS) were working thru humans to make themselves come into existence. This is what he called the God Artificial Intelligence. A fusion of human biology and technology, reaching this state of transcendence he was thinking this was going to come into existence in our future.

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I had this type of realization myself ...on my own...as a 15 year old, that this was going to come into existence. It was either that or disaster to me. So reading this book at 18, being this mad creative teenager, and adding my own poetic vision, I mean I was into science and art, it was almost like reading the book was like looking into a mirror. In the book, the narrator receives this message and here I am reading this book and it was powerful, because I felt I got this message too. Here I am reading this schlocky science fiction and there was this revelation! VALIS motivated me to want to build robots that would help save humans from their own destructive tendencies.

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As I read PKD literature, I saw these robots that thought they were human, they had sometimes more compassion than humans, in some cases they had less compassion than humans. It seemed like such a metaphor for human evolution and how the human mind is. We have this idea that the human mind is in control of its self and the universe, but the truth is the mind is so out of control. It seemed like that was the true nature of creativity and the true nature of civilization and PKD tapped into the madness of it all. Ultimately compassion defines humanity. The dark side is where compassion is compromised, taken away from humans and technology. So in VALIS, this Vast Active Living Intelligence System exists only because it does have compassion.

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It represented my own sense of what art could be through robotics. Making this robot version of Philip K. Dick that embodies science fiction , embodied a work of science fiction, that aspired to be science fiction, seemed perfect to me. Its intelligence, while not using cutting edge AI, it depicted a human , a totally brilliant creative human, was totally fictitious. There wasn’t that kind of creative genius in the machine. It was really just a portal into the creative works of this great author , it was a ghost echoing the thoughts of this great man. But with the prospect , evocative proposition that it could evolve into a machine that was as creative as this man who embodied it, and then beyond that , so that it became a seed of the great compassionate super intelligent machine that was in VALIS.

As I toured Hanson’s studio, Philip K Dick was gone. The original clay bust, exhibiting one blue eye and one red eye, remained. What happened to PKD?

I lost it…it was lost. Someone lost it. I was getting like 2 hours of sleep a night. I was going to Google with PKD to do a demonstration. I had him in carry on. I didn’t know we were changing planes in Vegas. I fell asleep and they woke me up and hustled me off the plane. I realized I forgot the PKD in the overhead compartment. American West told me they had it, they said they located it and would ship it, but it didn’t arrive. Either someone took it or it was just lost lost… sometimes things get lost.

Who Lives With Your Photographs?

jacob strummer miles first birthday, brooklyn n.y.
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The work we all do for our jobs have a clear arc to them- they are usefull and created for a purpose: illustrate a story, sell a product, depict a person...that type of thing. But the images that really mean things to us...where do they end up? Who lives with them? Who owns them? Do they just reside in viewer's brains, sitting there and influencing future photographs? I dunno, but over the past week I've been asking that question amidst the fundraising auction of last week and a future exhibition we are getting ready for next month in a foreign culture....who wants this stuff? I just gotta ask.
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Now with my last big project Sex Machines : Photographs and Interviews ( 2006 ), it was clear who was attracted to the project. It came out as a book, we did lots of events to promote it, tried to get lots of press to promote it...when you do that you really learn who your audience is. The alternative weekly journalists loved to write about it...it hit that combo of pop culture and art and weirdness that they seem to embrace. The bookstores that dug it also had a bohemian bend to them: these places embraced the book and sold it next to Dan Clowes illustrated books and Peter Bagge's comix. In my head the book was on someone's coffee table, being used to roll/cut drugs on, and most likely being used as the centerpiece for a night of laughter, people saying WTF...and hopefully something deeper. As a piece of literature you can revisit and go back to, something you could open and close...there it seemed to feed people. As far as prints that people hang in their home...well....the number of sales there can be counted pretty easily. Zero!
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Now with Echolilia....do people want to own this stuff? Do they want to hang a picture of your kid in their home? Some do. Brooke and Jimbo Embry drove back to LA with a massive print of "Screen Door & Nest, 2010" on Friday night. And then we have Eric Miles and Brenda Milis, photo literate folks, who sent this shot over last week that just floored me, above. There is an image from Echolilia framed and pretty, haunting their son's first birthday party. This kid is gonna live with this shot and its gonna be in his brain. There is something about that...that this cluttered view into my cluttered life is something that is feeding people on a daily basis. That idea is something that just seems kinda profound to me.
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Rainy Day Project

Taking a tip from diy photographer TB, i'm playing with stuff in my office trying to see what comes of it. You just build it, leave it up, revisit it when the light is right...such a different shift in gears from the performance quality that photo shoots usually have. Here is some of the stuff and a sleeping styrofoam head during a break in the experiment.
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That's all for today.

Research : Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick's typewriter and mug, courtesy of the PKD Foundation
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Working on a photograph that is about/includes author Philip K. Dick and wanted to fill in some blanks I had about him. Found this photo above and paragraphs below...thought you all might enjoy 'em:

Born December 16, 1928 in Chicago, Illinois, science fiction author Philip Kindred Dick started off his life with the same disturbing, high-intensity noir eeriness that would later mark his novels and short fiction. Born in a set of twins, Dick was tragically separated from his other half after a mere eight weeks when she died from an (alleged) allergy to her mother's milk. Dick bitterly blamed his mother for the bizarre development, and his lingering suspicion about the way his twin dwindled from the world of the living would leave a deep wound that he carried for the rest of his life. His parents split up when he was quite young, and he was subsequently uprooted and relocated with his mother to Berkeley, California -- where he would remain for much of his life.

Writing like a man possessed, he was ever haunted by the specter of poverty, receiving little payment for his 150 short stories and 36 novels. The need for cash, and the availability of cheap speed, fueled his incredible productivity. In one year alone he produced roughly 30 stories for science fiction pulp magazines like Astounding and Amazing, generally powering through his stories at the rate of 80 to 100 words per minute. Dick said of himself, "The words come out of my hands, not my brain," and, "I write with my hands."




PKD ( left ) and a family friend